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FILM; Why We Love the Mafia in the Movies

By PETER MAAS; Peter Maas's new book, ''In a Child's Name,'' will be published in November by Simon & Schuster. It is not about the Mafia.

Published: September 9, 1990

Then, whatever success ''The Valachi Papers'' enjoyed was immediately dwarfed by Mario Puzo's novel ''The Godfather'' and Francis Ford Coppola's two epic movie presentations in 1972 and 1974, the first based on the book and the second a totally cinematic extension of it.

More than that, Puzo cum Coppola crystallized a national need that apparently had escaped our usually alert seers of popular culture - something of mythic proportions to replace the western saga. And suddenly, there it was: the Mafia!

Unlike the English, who in an identity crisis can always comfort themselves with thoughts of Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table and good old Lancelot, or, say, the Germans with their Nibelungenlied (which, come to think about it, may not be all that comforting, at least to the rest of the world), we are a young country with fashionable myths produced for the most part, suitably enough, in that great American dream factory - i.e., Hollywood.

The western, for example, had a pretty good run. ''Go west, young man,'' said Horace Greeley to a nation gripped by the fervor of the frontier spirit, but it was Hollywood that engendered and cultivated the myth, imbedding it so deeply in the American psyche.

Who of a certain age cannot remember the clock ticking away in ''High Noon'' as Gary Cooper bravely strides alone down the street to confront a gang of cutthroats arriving on the noon train while craven townsfolk hide behind locked doors? Or the chill you felt when Alan Ladd as the mysterious stranger in ''Shane,'' on behalf of defenseless, God-fearing homesteaders, gamely takes on the villainous Jack Palance, a hired gun for the cattle barons - dressed all in black, in case we don't get the message - with his terrible, death's head grin. Or ''Bad Day at Black Rock,'' a western in modern guise, in which one-armed Spencer Tracy, another mysterious stranger, steps off a train in an isolated community, to give a World War II Silver Star to the father of a young Japanese-American soldier killed in combat under his command in Europe, only to learn that the locals have murdered the father in a burst of post-Pearl Harbor patriotism.

These films not only were marvelously directed and acted, but as befitted their influential place in our collective unconscious, they often invited serious public controversy. Was ''Shane'' too idealized a portrait of what we as a people were all about? Wasn't ''High Noon'' underneath really a seductive paean to fascism, with the strong man stepping forward to do what ordinary citizens can't or won't do for themselves? And ''Bad Day at Black Rock,'' released in the middle of the McCarthy witch-hunt era, was roundly attacked as being crafted by sinister Communist forces in Hollywood bent on undermining American virtue.

All at once, though, it was academic. By the early 60's the western, for any practical purpose, had become obsolete. Irrelevant. At the first sight of sagebrush, audiences right and left began nodding off.

The only new frontier was John F. Kennedy's. Real life wasn't so simple, so black and white. America, to coin a phrase, had lost its innocence. A shootout at the O.K. Corral didn't resolve anything for anyone anymore. Among other items, there was Vietnam. The Woodstock generation. The civil rights movement. Etc.

I like to think, though, that Hollywood itself hammered home the final nail in the coffin in 1974 with the hilarious western sendup ''Blazing Saddles.'' Maybe the thought of a black sheriff cleaning up things, a black railroad gang suddenly crooning Cole Porter songs, triggered laughter that was, well, a little too nervous. Uh, chickens coming home to roost.

Enter now the Mafia to embody and reflect our deepest anxieties, yearnings, wonderment and, most important, our imagination. What better mirrors fierce free enterprise with everyone's (shiver) life literally on the line, the resourcefulness of a nation ever on the move, constantly plunging into innovative and profitable technologies (like, say, casino gambling)? Who among us, having been wronged, has not fantasized about calling upon brothers in blood to wreak suitable vengeance - an ice-picked body, perhaps, trussed like a turkey bobbing up somewere?

Even the late Joe Valachi, who was the first member of the Mafia to reveal its innermost secrets, had a great idea for the opening scene of a movie, which he described during one of my interviews with him. We are in the murky depths of New York's East River. A scuba diver slowly wends his way downstream along the botton. All around him is a forest of bodies, upright in ''concrete overshoes,'' or held down by chains and anchors, twisting in the current. Was this art imitating life? Or was it the other way around? After all, Valachi himself had been a party to the placement of many such bodies during his long mob career. In this instance, his problem was that he couldn't figure out where the plot would go from there.

The funny thing is that when both ''The Valachi Papers'' and then ''The Godfather'' first appeared, there were instant and pretty vociferous outcries that ''the Mafia was a myth,'' which only goes to prove the old adage that it takes a myth to make one.